p03 Eliminating Religious Fanaticism, II

Baha'i Teachings

By John Taylor; 2008 May 13, 16 Jamal, 165 BE

 

Yesterday we defined religious fanaticism as an intolerant zeal, a strict, cultist fixation on one's own religious group. We then featured some observations on the wide ranging effects of fanaticism by the historian Edward Gibbon. Today I want to look over some features of the Baha'i approach to religious fanaticism.

 

Baha'is believe that God is a master teacher who demonstrates expertise by sending His Prophets or Manifestations to the worst of a bad lot. Jesus came to a rebellious Palestine, Muhammad to the recalcitrant desert tribes of Arabia, and the Bab and Baha'u'llah reformed the Iranians. All were well known to be infested by a spirit of fanaticism in an age marked by intense rivalry and virulent bigotry among peoples, religions and cultures.

 

The Iranians, then known as Persians, were an independent nation ideally situated to become a crossroads of travel and trade between the Orient and the Occident. They lived on land blessed with bountiful resources. They spoke Persian, recognized and highly esteemed for its beauty; throughout the Muslim world it is known as the language of poetry. However the Persian never fully recovered from invasion, occupation and terrible devastation wrought by the Mongols. For centuries they had been sunk in a Dark Age marked by isolationism and almost complete ignorance of the world outside. They adhered to Shi'ih Islam, a sect of Islam that divided rather than united them with their Muslim co-religionists and neighbors on all sides. Long before there was such a thing as a nation, religious feeling in Persia was intensified by a strong nationalist sentiment. These two reinforced one another in a closed feedback loop. The result was the same as when you place a microphone right next to a speaker, an intense shriek of fanatical rage.

 Shoghi Effendi characterized sections of Persian society as marked by "apathy and indolence," utterly lacking in "a sense of public duty and of loyalty to principle," as well as a "lack of concerted effort and constancy in action, the habit of secrecy and blind surrender to the capricious will of an ignorant and fanatical clergy..." (Baha'i Administration, pp. 172-173)

 

It would not be inaccurate to say that the entire Baha'i Faith was designed not only to reform the world's most fanatical society, but also to do what would be otherwise historically inconceivable, uproot fanaticism completely. At almost the end of His Mission, Baha'u'llah admonished His followers to completely obliterate this "world devouring fire,"

 

"Gird up the loins of your endeavor, O people of Baha, that haply the tumult of religious dissension and strife that agitateth the peoples of the earth may be stilled, that every trace of it may be completely obliterated. For the love of God, and them that serve Him, arise to aid this sublime and momentous Revelation. Religious fanaticism and hatred are a world-devouring fire, whose violence none can quench. The Hand of Divine power can, alone, deliver mankind from this desolating affliction." (Epistle, 13-14)

 

Baha'u'llah then points to a long war of aggression by Persia on Russia that had opened the 19th Century. This conflict was conceived and instigated by the Mullahs or Shiite clergy. It continued before, during and after Napoleon's attempted invasion of Russia. After over a decade of conflict, in the latter stages of which Jihad was declared, the result was Persia's invasion, ignominious defeat and great financial loss. "How many the villages that were completely wiped out!," Baha'u'llah declares.

 

In the mid-1870's Baha'u'llah directed His Son, 'Abdu'l-Baha, to write an anonymous treatise to the leaders and people of Persia explaining how to reform their weakened and degraded condition. In this document, now known as "The Secret of Divine Civilization, 'Abdu'l-Baha pointed out that the entire legal structure of Islam had been designed to remove fanaticism by gradually weaning the Arabs away from former practices.

 

"Would it have been impossible for Muhammad to reveal a Law which bore no resemblance whatever to any practice current in the Days of Ignorance? Rather, the purpose of His consummate wisdom was to free the people from the chains of fanaticism which had bound them hand and foot, and to forestall those very objections which today confuse the mind and trouble the conscience of the simple and helpless." (Secret, 28-29)

 

He then points out that the early corruption of Islam itself was due to the fact that the Arabs had so soon forgotten this sacred purpose of God's faith and Law, to extirpate fanaticism completely.

 

"In brief, it was because they forgot the meaning of the Law of God that they became involved in ignorant fanaticism and blameworthy practices such as insurgence and sedition. Their divines, having concluded that all those essential qualifications of humankind set forth in the Holy Book were by then a dead letter, began to think only of furthering their own selfish interests, and afflicted the people by allowing them to sink into the lowest depths of heedlessness and ignorance." (Abdu'l-Baha, Secret, 77)

 

Abdu'l-Baha then pointed out that, far from promoting their beliefs, the fanaticism of the Mullahs was systematically tearing them down.

 

"One of the principal reasons why people of other religions have shunned and failed to become converted to the Faith of God is fanaticism and unreasoning religious zeal." (Secret, 52)

 

Abdu'l-Baha passionately begged His compatriots to repent of their fanatical ways.

 

"Aim high, choose noble ends; how long this lethargy, how long this negligence! Despair, both here and hereafter, is all you will gain from self-indulgence; abomination and misery are all you will harvest from fanaticism, from believing the foolish and the mindless." (Secret, 105)

 

==========

 

Having established this fundamental aim, I do not want to dwell at further length on the many Baha'i statements, events and campaigns against religious fanaticism in the intervening century and a half. What I want to do is to fast forward into our post September 11, 2001 world. These attacks by young Muslim men on the symbolic center of capitalism focused the attention of the West on the clear and present danger that religious fanaticism poses. Some seven months later the Universal House of Justice took the bold initiative of writing all the major leaders of world religions. Whereas Abdu'l-Baha had addressed the Persians, and others only by implication, this message was openly universal. The House wrote the leaders of all faiths,

 

"Tragically, organized religion, whose very reason for being entails service to the cause of brotherhood and peace, behaves all too frequently as one of the most formidable obstacles in the path; to cite a particular painful fact, it has long lent its credibility to fanaticism. We feel a responsibility, as the governing council of one of the world religions, to urge earnest consideration of the challenge this poses for religious leadership. Both the issue and the circumstances to which it gives rise require that we speak frankly. We trust that common service to the Divine will ensure that what we say will be received in the same spirit of goodwill as it is put forward." (The Universal House of Justice, 2002 April, To the World's Religious Leaders, p. 4)

 

They went on to point out that a third of Europe had been wiped out by the 16th Century wars of religion, and that the subsequent revulsion against religious fanaticism led to a rift between faith and secular society. Elsewhere they wrote that the dichotomy is natural result of a distorting tendency of our brain,

 

"The sundering of science and religion is but one example of the tendency of the human mind (which is necessarily limited in its capacity) to concentrate on one virtue, one aspect of truth, one goal, to the exclusion of others. This leads, in extreme cases, to fanaticism and the utter distortion of truth, and in all cases to some degree of imbalance and inaccuracy." (Messages, 1963-1986, p. 390)

 

Later the House came out with One Common Faith, a book-length treatment of the issues they had brought up in the letter to world religious leaders. In the opening sentences of the forward, they wrote,

 

"Our action arose out of awareness that the disease of sectarian hatreds, if not decisively checked, threatens harrowing consequences that will leave few areas of the world unaffected. The letter acknowledged with appreciation the achievements of the interfaith movement, to which Baha'is have sought to contribute since an early point in the movement's emergence. Nevertheless, we felt we must be forthright in saying that, if the religious crisis is to be addressed as seriously as is occurring with respect to other prejudices afflicting humankind, organized religion must find within itself a comparable courage to rise above fixed conceptions inherited from a distant past."

In view of their earlier point that one third of Europe had been killed by inter-religious conflict, it would seem worthwhile for us all to study and try to fully grasp the implications of this book, "One Common Faith." Call it an anti-holocaust prophylaxis!